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Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks, by Chera Kee

2022; University College Cork; Issue: 22 Linguagem: Inglês

10.33178/alpha.22.11

2009-4078

Lea Espinoza Garrido,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

In her ambitious study, Chera Kee seeks to revise one of the most prominent monstrous figures in Western popular culture since the early 2000s—the zombie. Building on Sarah Juliet Lauro’s important work in the field, Kee proposes a rather broad definition of zombihood “as a state existing somewhere between the human and the not quite human, as a state of liminality associated with—but not entirely dictated by—a loss of free will” (15). Yet, Kee distances herself from some of the more dominant readings of the zombie as primarily an empty container onto which all kinds of social, cultural, and political anxieties can be projected to express concerns about an equally broad range of dehumanising tendencies in various contexts. In contrast, by distinguishing between “ordinary” and “extra-ordinary” zombies (3), the book provides a productive new lens through which we can study this influential figure.